Safety starts with a plan

Features - Safety Focus

“While recycling is good for the environment,” according to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA’s) website, “it can be dangerous for workers. Certain materials that are recycled or reused, such as scrap metal, electronics, batteries and used oil and other chemicals, have materials that directly pose hazards to workers.”

OSHA continues, “Collection is one of the most dangerous activities in the recycling industry. Tragically, workers have lost their lives due to being backed-over by trucks or struck by oncoming vehicles as they were exiting the trucks they were driving.”

According to the recent fatality report issued by the Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA), Silver Spring, Maryland, the waste and recycling sectors in the U.S. and Canada recorded 22 deaths in the first month of 2019. Of those, 15 were members of the public who were killed in collisions involving collection vehicles, and eight were operators. In the first 10 days of January 2018, seven fatalities were reported. By the end of the month, that number had increased to 19. January 2019 and January 2018, respectively, hold the highest and second highest number of fatalities the industry has seen in a single month.

Incidents such as these involving collection vehicles come at a cost, according to SWANA’s data: Backing accidents involving only property damage have a minimum average cost of $7,400, while accidents involving injuries have a minimum average cost of $27,558, and accidents that result in fatalities cost $500,000 at minimum on average.

Accidents by nature are unplanned. But by creating strategic plans that include the integration of safety training, education and technologies, significant strides can be made to mitigate or completely avoid future incidents and collisions.

Plan to avoid

A successful safety plan should demonstrate how to avoid problematic situations and provide a detailed description of how to deal with these circumstances should they arise.

Unfortunately, many accidents are caused by human error, but even they can be managed through proper implementation of corrective and preventive safety programs.

“Have a proactive safety program in place, train your team and then train them some more,” labor lawyer John Cruickshank, a partner at Cruickshank and Alaniz, Houston, says. “Maintain the quality of your operators, maintain your equipment and keep detailed maintenance records, and your fleet will be better prepared to mitigate the risks that come with a potential accident.

“Labor law is the intersection between how the law requires an employer to manage its employees and how an employer effectively manages its employees,” he adds.

OSHA standards, Cruickshank says, set the stage for a proactive safety plan in which safety management should include properly maintaining equipment, integrating safety technologies, keeping records and providing frequent and ongoing employee training to mitigate risks and protect a company from a lawsuit.

“A lawsuit avoided is better than a lawsuit won,” Cruickshank says.

“A lawsuit avoided is better than a lawsuit won.” – John Cruickshank, Cruickshank and Alaniz

The reality is, if a company vehicle is involved in an accident, a company should expect to be sued.

SWANA calculates the average price of an accident claim involving a fleet vehicle at between $5,000 and $8,000, depending on location. Regarding workers’ compensation, the average cost of a work-related injury is $4,000 to $6,000.

Many costs are associated with accidents involving vehicles. Indirectly, a company will have to deal with lost production time, time lost in hiring and training a replacement, reduced morale, OSHA penalties, paperwork and more.

Plan to protect

To avoid the potentially insurmountable costs of an accident, a company must first protect itself and its employees. To do this, the first course of action is to identify all health and safety risks and mitigate them. Fleet safety management necessitates understanding the causes of accidents and creating a corrective plan with measurable goals and objectives.

This requires an integrated approach across the spectrum of fleet safety practices and support from the C- level down. Through this corrective plan, driver qualifications, training programs, good-conduct policies, vehicle maintenance, inspection processes and procedures, postaccident management and a reasonably comprehensive plan to adopt and implement safety technologies will mitigate, if not eliminate, employee-related health and safety issues.

In providing a safe work environment, companies must consider adopting safety technology solutions and implementation plans to combat vehicle safety issues throughout the collection and transportation process, according to “Commercial Fleet: Managing the Legal Risks of Vehicle Safety Technologies, A White Paper,” which Cruickshank co-authored with fellow attorney John Phillips. My company, Preco Electronics, sponsored the white paper.

The white paper states that a safety technology integration plan is a “blueprint for managing and improving vehicle safety but also a self-serving document intended for litigation. Its purpose is to demonstrate and persuade a jury that the company made more than reasonable efforts to integrate vehicle safety technologies where it could and made reasonable business necessity decisions where it couldn’t.”

Such plans should recognize important safety technologies, discuss the cost of the technology relative to its impact on safety, provide a comparison of what other companies in the industry are doing and outline a reasonable timeline for integration and retrofitting.

According to the white paper, the plan should be flexible and scalable, with any deviations documented.

Proximity detection technologies that are designed to prevent incidents from causing excessive downtime, injuries and fatalities can be essential for a comprehensive safety program and should be considered in a company’s safety technology integration plan.

The author is a fleet sales manager with Preco Electronics, Boise, Idaho. He can be contacted by phone at 208-323-7109. More information on Preco’s vehicle collision mitigation technology is available at www.preco.com.

While the municipalities WM serves each have their own curbside programs with different guidelines, a consistent streamlined message throughout the country is “the most impactful approach for the recycling industry,” says Susan Moulton, national senior public sector solutions director at WM.

Since launching Recycle Often. Recycle Right. five years ago, the program has grown to include in-house training techniques and open-source customizable tools for businesses, residents, governments and institutions to use.

Moulton says the campaign is “a national research and fact-based behavior-change campaign to recycle, and it’s focused on both recycling often—getting more in the container—as well as recycling right—improving quality.”

Streamlining the message

In late 2013, WM started to research residential recycling behavior. From how materials are collected to what materials are recyclable in each city—most cities accept paper and cardboard, while some have phased out glass and some types of plastic containers—recent changes in the industry have left customers confused about what they can and can’t recycle.

“Single-stream has been a great program in increasing participation and volume, and it also has enabled residents and businesses alike to put all recyclables in one convenient cart,” Moulton says. “On the flip side, they’ve also been able to put a lot of materials in there that shouldn’t be recycled.”

WM’s research sought to understand how cities communicate to their residents and what channels are most effective. One of the campaign’s major focuses early on was educating residents on some of the biggest contaminants.

RecycleOftenRecycleRight.com offers recycling labels, posters, cart hangers, guides and decals that businesses and communities can print and use to help with their education efforts. Toolkits, posters and videos targeting specific campaigns, such as no plastic bags, also are available. WM sought to get everyone on the same page through the program.

“We all have different communication tools, channels and assets, and just making sure we’re leveraging all of them and ensuring the program is sustainable is key,” Moulton says. “You really need that multifaceted, targeted ongoing educational program, or your program is not going to improve or grow.”

Collaborative effort

Training frontline workers on how to identify and record contamination, as well as how to educate at the curb using tags on recycling containers, has been very effective for WM. The program also allows outside organizations and municipalities to easily share recycling updates and guidelines online, Moulton says.

WM recently started offering widgets that cities can use on their websites or in newsletters. For example, when the company launched its latest No Plastic Bags campaign, cities and communities across the country were able to use the same banners with key messages, sharing the same targeted campaign to get the message across to customers.

“Whether information is on a city’s website or it’s on our website or in a brochure, we want to make sure there’s consistency for the customer,” Moulton says.

According to WM, contamination rates on average are greater than 25 percent in MRFs, with about 1 in 4 items that is placed in a recycling cart not being recyclable. Tagging—marking a recycling bin that contains unacceptable items with a tag informing the resident that is the case—is being widely adopted in recycling programs to improve contamination rates.

“Some communities are taking away recycling containers from habitual offenders,” Moulton says. “What we find consistently, whether it’s businesses or residents, 20 percent of the folks are making up 80 percent of the contamination. When you continue to show them, talk to them, sometimes you need that additional reinforcement to change behavior.”

WM also is using technology to identify contamination.

“We are using cameras on the [collection] trucks to identify contamination,” Moulton explains. “We take pictures, and those pictures are available to the commercial customers, as well as sales representatives who provide technical assistance, so they can speak specifically to what is going on in a particular customer’s bin and really find the right solution.”

The long haul

WM has worked with communities on several campaigns throughout the years. The company has gotten mayors and drivers involved in making videos, and it’s encouraged local businesses to display “how to recycle” posters in their establishments. WM’s average targeted campaign where “we have great collaboration” reduces contamination by 20 to 40 percent, she says.

WM also is collaborating with The Recycling Partnership, Falls Church, Virginia, to learn and share research, as well as with CDSM, Swansea, Wales, which produces bespoke e-learning content and platform solutions.

Moulton says “it’s not easy” to improve and grow recycling programs, but positive results will happen over time with education and collaboration.

“If it was easy, it probably would have already been solved for, so make sure you’re committed to it for the long term. I think that collaboration with the communities is extremely important. It’s a little bit of a heavy lift in the beginning; but, as time goes on, your efforts will be greatly reduced.”

From that point on, it’s all about sustaining the program for everyone involved.

“Think about the program from end to end,” she suggests. “From a resident getting a tag at the curb to them calling in to a city or a call center, you need to understand what was marked on the tag. It needs to be an integrated program, and we’re all working toward educating the customer.”

The author is the digital editor for the Recycling Today Media Group and can be reached at kmaile@gie.net.

About six years ago, Smurfit Kappa Group, Dublin, Ireland, expanded its footprint in the United States after it acquired Orange County Container Group, Forney, Texas, for $340 million. Through that deal, Smurfit Kappa Group received eight packaging facilities, seven distribution centers in Mexico, seven wholly owned recycling centers in the southern U.S., two packaging facilities and a recycled containerboard mill in Forney.

Since that deal, the company has grown its presence in Texas and Arizona. It also has invested in its operations located along the border with Mexico.

Marty Rusk, Smurfit Kappa North America’s vice president of North America recycling operations, says the company has been growing its recycling efforts since the 2012 acquisition, too. Smurfit Kappa’s seven recycling centers are located in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas. The company also has a brokerage office in Mesquite, Texas.

The primary purpose of these recycling centers is to supply Smurfit Kappa’s Forney mill. However, he adds that the company’s recycling division has grown to supply other mills with recovered fiber.

“Our primary focus is to supply our mill, but we’ve grown because of our service record and our pay,” he says. “Other mills can trust the material we can support them with because we’re a mill-operated business. We preach the gospel of quality.”

Although the company’s focus is on recovered fiber, he adds that Smurfit Kappa North America’s customers “wanted us to handle [plastics]. They wanted a one-stop shop recycling professional.”

By performing some sorting in-house at its recycling centers, Rusk says the company has more control over the recovered fiber that ends up at its mill.

“We’re controlling our own destiny by working directly with our own accounts, sorting it and bringing it into our mill,” Rusk says.

However, the company’s Forney mill is not totally immune to contamination concerns because it has contract agreements with outside suppliers as well. Rusk notes that bales delivered by suppliers tend to have slightly higher contamination rates. He adds that he noticed higher contamination levels in the last two quarters of 2018 from many suppliers.

“We’re controlling our own destiny by working directly with our own accounts, sorting it and bringing it into our mill.” – Marty Rusk, Smurfit Kappa North America

“The main impact [of China’s scrap import restrictions] is the availability of quality fiber,” Rusk says. “If a supplier was moving material to China, they were used to those lower quality levels, which is lower than our standards. China shut doors, and they didn’t adjust quick enough, so now there’s no place for some of the paper. There is a glut in the market, and that’s reflected in the price.”

Smurfit Kappa North America hasn’t cut back on its contracts with its recovered fiber suppliers. Instead, Rusk says the company has been inspecting incoming loads more thoroughly and has taken a hard stance on rejections when needed. If rejections persist with a vendor, he says the company will “work with the supplier on their facility floor and offer suggestions on how they can improve their bales.” He adds, “Nobody benefits from a rejected load.”

Rusk continues, “A lot of large companies out there have been talking at conferences about the percentage of contaminants they are seeing in the waste stream. It takes effort from everybody to make sure this doesn’t contaminate our system.”

Constant contact

Smurfit Kappa North America’s recycling division works alongside its suppliers as much as possible. Rusk says the company’s suppliers for its Forney paper mill are all based within a 300-mile radius—from near Shreveport, Louisiana, to the east to Abilene, Texas, to the west.

Rusk says it’s ideal for the company to visit with suppliers every month “just to ensure that quality is on their minds.”

One of the biggest things Rusk says Smurfit Kappa educates its suppliers on is sorting. He says he reminds them to be teaching their customers and communities about how to recycle properly.

“The more that [suppliers and recyclers] can coach their customers to separate at the source, the better things will be for the entire system,” he says.

Rusk adds that retail generators also should educate their employees on what can be included in recycling. “[Employees] change at these companies all the time,” he says. “You have to be sure they’re up to speed.”

Although educating suppliers takes “a lot” of time, Rusk says it will help to improve the quality of recovered fiber going to paper mills in the long run.

“It’s all about how they sort material, that’s key,” he says. “It’s all about the sorting process and educating on sorting.”

Smurfit Kappa also educates suppliers on any noticeable safety concerns. Rusk says he recently saw a safety concern with a retail chain supplier. The retailer’s drivers weren’t completely safe in their unloading processes.

“From time to time, you hear of drivers getting hurt in the process of opening up a door,” he says. “So, we’ve come up with straps we put on the door before we unload anything in our paper mill. They can open up the door, and if something’s against it, it can’t fall back on the driver because of the straps. It’s a simple thing like that that goes a long way.”

The author is managing editor of Recycling Today and can be contacted at msmalley@gie.net.

Pulling its weight

Features - Plastic Stewardship

Midland, Michigan-based Dow Chemical Co. is best known for its diversified portfolio of specialty chemicals, advanced materials, agrosciencesand plastics businesses. While the company has been working in the packaging space since 1940, more recently it has helped to manage packaging at the end of its useful life.

End-of-life innovations

In 2014, Dow partnered with Reynolds Consumer Products to introduce the Hefty EnergyBag program, which is designed to divert difficult-to-recycle plastics, such as candy wrappers and juice pouches, for energy recovery. The company says that as of July 2018, the Hefty EnergyBag program has collected more than 176,500 bags and diverted more than 115 tons of plastics from landfills. Dow recently announced that it would make an additional $100,000 in grant funding available for organizations to establish Hefty EnergyBag programs in their communities.

The company also has sought to improve the recyclability of plastic packaging, having introduced its RecycleReady Technology. Dow says RecycleReady Technology offers packaging manufacturers a sustainable, more recyclable packaging system by giving them a way to create flexible packaging that can be easily recycled through existing polyethylene (PE) film recycle streams, such as grocery store drop-off programs in the United States and Canada.

In addition to innovations such as these, the company is looking to address the issue of plastic waste in the environment.

Plastics in the environment

Dow says it has played a leading role in forming the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW), a coalition of 30 companies throughout the plastics and consumer goods supply chain. The organization has committed more than $1 billion with the goal of raising $1.5 billion over the next five years to develop and scale solutions that manage plastic waste and promote postuse solutions of plastic.

“Keeping our environment free of waste is important to the future of Dow and our industry, but more importantly, it’s important to the future of our planet,” says Dow CEO Jim Fitterling in a news release announcing the company’s involvement in AEPW.

The AEPW has partnered with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Geneva, and will prioritize investments in infrastructure development to collect and manage waste and increase recycling; innovation to advance and scale new technologies that make recycling and recovering plastics easier; educating and engaging governments, businesses and communities; and cleaning concentrated areas of plastic already in the environment.

Global Sustainability Director Haley Lowry says the issue of ocean plastics resonates with Dow because “it is one of the biggest challenges and opportunities we’re seeing at this point and time in history.”

Dow’s involvement in AEPW is the most recent of its actions to address plastic waste in the environment. The company also is a founding investor in Circulate Capital’s $100 million effort to incubate and finance companies and infrastructure that prevent waste in oceans.

Additionally, Dow has joined the World Economic Forum’s Global Plastic Action Partnership, designed to bring businesses, society, national and local governments, community groups and experts together to collaborate on the issue of plastic pollution. This partnership plans to invest in localized solutions by 2020 that can be adapted and implemented in other countries. The first project is a collaboration with the government of Indonesia.

Dow also announced in October 2018 that it is donating an additional $1 million to The Ocean Conservancy over next two years to support waste collection and recycling in Southeast Asia.

Getting their hands dirty

Dow employees have taken an active role to clean up plastics in the environment, literally getting their hands dirty through the company’s #PullingOurWeight campaign in partnership with The Ocean Conservancy and local organizations. Through this effort, which began in the fall of 2018, more than 5,600 Dow employees, families and friends participated in 55 cleanups globally, removing 52,500 pounds of trash from beaches and waterways.

A Dow employee cleans up waste near a river in Saginaw, Michigan, as part of the company’s #PullingOurWeight initiative.

The company’s goal was to engage its employees, who Lowry describes as “passionate” about making a difference. Dow challenged them to collect 4 pounds of trash per person, but they achieved double that goal.

She says that while Dow has participated in these types of cleanup efforts in the past on a smaller scale, Fitterling has “put out bold initiatives on the sustainability side and wants to make an impact on solving some of these issues.” Lowry adds, “It started at the top down, and our employees were really mobilized.”

While much of the plastics collected during these efforts was recycled, she says, some was “super dirty,” making landfill or incineration more viable options. Lowry also acknowledges having to establish end markets for some of the plastics that were collected so they could be recycled. In Africa, for instance, the company worked with an NGO to further sort the collected plastics, segregating the flexible packaging to be recycled into school desks.

Partnering for change

Dow says it continues to collaborate across the value chain on plastics recycling. “This is a big thing for us,” Lowry says. “We make material, but our customers transform that material into great packaging solutions. We know that we can’t solve this alone and that it’s going to take cross- value-chain participation.”

To that end, the company is a founding member of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC), a project of GreenBlue, Charlottesville, Virginia. The SPC collaborates with packaging converters and brand owners to increase production of stand-up pouches that can be recycled through existing PE film recycling streams.

Dow says it also is working to complement its circular economy activities by driving development of new commercial recycling business models and growth strategies to monetize plastics waste recycling streams globally. Lowry says, “It’s important that options exist” for managing end-of-life plastic packaging. “It’s just too valuable to be used only once.”

The author is editor of Recycling Today and can be contacted at dtoto@gie.net.

Back-of-the-house recycling

Features - Commercial Recycling

Recycling in restaurants is mandatory in some U.S. cities and states, but it can be challenging for staff working in tight spaces.

In Chicago, restaurants must source separate and recycle at least three materials (unless a single recyclable can be shown to comprise 51 percent of the waste stream by weight), meet targeted recycling rates and provide an educational program to new hires.

In San Francisco, restaurants must separate recyclables from trash and organics, and fines for noncompliance can be as high as $1,000 per day.

Fast-food chains and restaurants, which generate large streams of cardboard, plastics and metals, are trying to comply with these recycling laws while also meeting U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards and managing program costs.

Two companies that are helping restaurants manage their recycling programs are Mil-tek, a global supplier of pneumatic balers with small footprints, and Columbus, Ohio-based Elytus, a managed service provider that helps commercial businesses manage their waste and recycling operations through its WInStream software.

Changing regulations

Over the years, fast-food chains have had to rethink their recycling programs and the space they dedicate to this task because of commercial recycling legislation. In some states where single-stream recycling was previously acceptable, restaurants are now required to separate several recyclables.

“Where restaurants used to be able to have a catch-all container for recyclables, they’re now being asked to look at managing several waste streams in the same building,” says Mil-tek USA Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Kim Vandbaek. “It’s very complex if you’re working out of a 3,000-square-foot restaurant that’s already stretched for space and suddenly you need to add two to three [recycling] streams to your operations.”

Kristian Skannerup founded Mil-tek in 1992 in Denmark with the goal of helping businesses optimize their waste and recycling systems and become “better environmental stewards.” Mil-tek expanded to the U.S. in 2011. Headquartered in Sterling, Virginia, Mil-tek USA focuses on helping restaurants, especially fast-food chains, meet recycling challenges with balers and compactors.

“We’re seeing more and more progressive states requiring source separation,” Vandbaek says. “Paper, plastic and metal has to be separated. Restaurants are finding themselves running out of space and racking up a very hefty bill for all these services because it’s hard for them to be efficient.”

The company says cardboard makes up 40 percent of the recycling stream in restaurants. Mil-tek offers balers for old corrugated containers (OCC), as well as for film plastics, metal cans and polystyrene. The company’s polystyrene densifier, typically used by reprocessors or recycling companies, creates compact bricks that can be sold to manufacturers.

Mil-tek says its smallest cardboard baler takes up 22 by 32 inches of floorspace and is powered by air, which means it meets health and safety codes for in-kitchen use and helps restaurants prepare small bales for haulers and recyclers.

Making connections

Mil-tek provides restaurants training and education, as well as recycling coordination. The company partners with haulers and recyclers across the U.S. to ensure materials separated at the source find proper end markets.

“Basically, when you buy one of our machines, you get a relationship with a recycling hauler,” Vandbaek explains. The network “consists of a lot of local haulers that are helping us out region by region, city by city to be able to get this kind of coverage. You can claim a baler is a baler is a baler, but the solution in its totality is what makes the difference.”

“If I asked a restaurant in California where they would need most help in their operations, half of them would mention waste and recycling programs.” – Kim Vandbaek, Mil-tek USA

In Houston, Mil-tek has established relationships with about 200 restaurants and area recyclers. “These customers had only limited recycling, and now all their materials can go straight into the recycling industry realm,” Vandbaek says. “It significantly increased the market in Houston.”

Julien Greboval, Mil-tek USA’s sales and marketing coordinator, explains that Mil-tek is at the beginning of a larger industry value chain. As more restaurants separate recyclables at the point of generation and bale materials, clean commodities are added into the recycling stream.

“Contamination is one of the largest issues today, and China has turned way more sophisticated when it comes to contaminated products, so at-source compaction and at-source baling ensure a cleaner product,” Vandbaek adds. “We find very little contamination percentages in the products that are coming out of our balers. It meets what we normally call tomorrow’s standards, but it appears to be today’s standards now.”

Ensuring ease

Another company working in the restaurant sector is Elytus. When Matthew Hollis founded the company in 2011, he says very few commercial kitchens and restaurants had recycling programs. He learned why by watching the kitchen hum during dinner rush.

“They’ve got a menu of 100 different items. They’re receiving orders every other second. They’ve got 15 people back there chopping, cutting and turning out these dishes with precision,” Hollis says. “What we realized is the biggest reason restaurants weren’t recycling is it just was not efficient or easy enough for the back-of-house staff to do.”

“In California, where it’s $150 per ton to dispose of waste, compost and recycling becomes a necessity really quickly,” he adds.

Elytus also helps restaurants recycle nontraditional commodities. Through its fry oil recovery program, for instance, restaurants can arrange for collection of and receive rebates for their end-of-life oil.

Rising demand

Changes in commercial recycling regulations have presented challenges and opportunities for the recycling industry.

Mil-tek unveiled a compactor at the Chick-fil-A NEXT conference in February in Anaheim, California. The compactor was developed with feedback from Chick-fil-A operators to address the needs of the restaurant community.

“If I asked a restaurant in California where they would need most help in their operations, half of them would mention waste and recycling programs,” Vandbaek says. “Nobody is really focusing on that, and with this increased requirement for further recycling, larger chains are demanding solutions for this.”

As recycling regulations continue to evolve, Vandbaek anticipates that the need for recycling programs in the sector will only increase.

“More and more convenience stores and gas stations are opening fast-food chains and more supermarkets are opening their own cafés or restaurants to create better experiences for customers,” Vandbaek says. “That also means that our products are becoming more widely applicable.”

The author is the digital editor for the Recycling Today Media Group and can be reached at kmaile@gie.net.